72 OCTOBER

of no sound or light and the windows should be opened and the heat off.l10 In
your letter of July sent in response to my sending you the first draft of the
Ensemble you said I left no room for nothing to happen. Now the changing of
the 3rd movement is not conceived by me as "nothing happening" but rather the
change was motivated by my increasing concern to achieve an allegorical function
in my work. Actually, I can not conceive of nothing happeningll-I'm not trying
to make a logical statement. In fact, a kind of "nothing" image is very important
to me and I have even said that I want to arrive at zero, although going toward it is
like successive divisions of a line-for the arrival one must go outside the process.
For the time being I am involved in a kind of reducing process of attempting to
find images that are closer and closer to the limit. This is, of course, very
Protestant-wanting to achieve an absolute or final statement, to put a stop to
process, to beat time (unintended pun). I am able to assign both a negative and
positive value to this approach. On the one hand it reflects the desire to get outside
by making logical steps (doing next to nothing so that nothing will be a real
"next"). Then there is the dislike of the personality which needs to go on making
art-perhaps by a kind of attenuation one will finally lose the habit. On the
positive side there is my feeling about perception itself. You mentioned in your

10. In its new form, this movement recalls La Monte Young's Composition1960 #4, in which the
lights are turned off for the duration of the piece and no intentional actions are performed.
Reprinted in An Anthology,ed. La Monte Young (New York:Fluxus Editions, 1963).
11. Cf. the first line of Morris's "BlankForm" essay of 1960-61 which was to have been published in
An Anthology:"From the subjective point of view there is no such thing as nothing" (reprinted in
Barbara Haskell, Blam!: TheExplosionof Pop, Minimalism,and Performance,1958-1964 [New York:Whitney
Museum of American Art, 1984], p. 101). Morris's statement echoes Cage's famous pronouncement
that there is no such thing as an absolute silence.

Game Switch. 1961.